Everyone Has Something They Need To Work At…

I’m going to be very brief here, as I think this is an important enough topic to mention purely on its own. Every parent is trying to raise their child in a way that is desirable. I don’t know anyone who says, “I want to do it wrong.” So I’ve been pondering some questions at night and of course, I’m constantly assessing my parenting techniques. Are they working, is this helping, am I just going to end up raising a bunch of children who resent everything I’ve done?

So here’s something for you to chew on…

When our children make mistakes, how do we act or react to the situation. Hopefully we aren’t reacting, but I’ve done my fair share of that too, I’m afraid to say, I’m a constant work in progress. You see, I want my children to know they did something wrong, and I want them to WANT to do what is right. That WANT should come from their inner workings, and hopefully not just because they don’t want to make mom mad, or get in some sort of trouble. I try to sit down and explain to them about what happened, and how to fix the mistake. I’ve even told them a few times, “Everyone makes mistakes.”

Everyone does indeed make mistakes, but should I be saying that to my child? I don’t think so. Because kids tend to think very literally, I think saying, “everyone makes mistakes” is telling them it is okay to make mistakes because everyone does it. Instead, I’m going to start using the phrase, “everyone has something they need to work on.” That statement tells the kids that they have work to do to correct their mistakes, but not to feel so bad, because we are all working on something. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right. Maybe three years down the road, I’ll change my mind, but I feel very confident this is the right path down the road to correcting mistakes.

This is just one small thing, to help correct one other small thing. The bigger picture still needs to be worked on, and there is much more to help in this situation than just this one phrase, but I felt it was a good starting point, and I’m going to work on it myself. We all have something we need to work at, right?